Decay Quotes - page 3

Bedrooms and libraries ought to have an eastern exposure, because their purposes require the morning light, and also because books in such libraries will not decay. (Vitruvius)

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.

Allen Ginsberg

History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.

A. J. P. Taylor

Harmony makes small things grow, lack of it makes great things decay.

Sallust

There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.

Robinson Jeffers

Any church which forsakes the regular and uniform for the periodical and spasmodic service of God, is doomed to decay; any church which relies for its spiritual strength and growth entirely upon seasons of "revival," will very soon have no genuine revivals to rely on. Our holy God will not conform His blessings to man's moods and moral caprice. If a church is declining, it may require a "revival" to restore it; but what need was there of its declining?

Theodore L. Cuyler

Like other systems in decay, the Roman Empire continued to function for several generations after its vitality was sapped. For nearly a hundred years our Island was one of the scenes of conflict between a dying civilisation and lusty, famishing barbarism.

Winston Churchill

You that in far-off countries of the sky can dwell secure, look back upon me here; for I am weary of this frail world's decay.

Murasaki Shikibu

Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights The fairest feelings of the opening heart, Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love, And judgment cease to wage unnatural war With passion's unsubduable array.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

To contribute to the emergence of a society in which development will supplant stagnation, in which growth will take the place of decay, and in which culture will put an end to barbarism is the noblest, and, indeed, the only true function of intellectual endeavor. (Paul A. Baran)

Much if not all we know about the complex mechanism responsible for the development (and stagnation) of productive forces, and for the rise and decay of social organizations, is the result of the analytical work undertaken by Marx and by those whom he inspired.

Paul A. Baran

The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. ... The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.

Aldo Leopold

Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree?

Gregory Maguire

In order to induce the process of decay, water is necessary. I think that, in the case of women, men are the water.

Natsuo Kirino

What more could you want? How about dominion over this 'beautiful place'? Beauty doesn't last. Friends and family decay. Power is the only thing that goes on forever." Jack answered with his gut. "No, love goes on forever.

P. C. Cast

The first thing you have to do is accept that decay sets in and there's nothing you can do about it.

Francesca Annis

And in the afternoon they entered a land - but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay.

George Washington Cable

I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off.

Harold Brodkey

Life is one long decay, no? There's a lot of beauty in it. Like the patina in an old city.

Urs Fischer

Our works decay and disappear but God gentlest works stay looking down on the ruins we toil to rear. (Walter Smith)

We know that our senses are subject to decay, that from our middle years they are decaying all the time; but happily it is as if we didn't know and didn't believe.

William Henry Hudson

Consent in virtue knit your hearts so fast, That still the knot, in spite of death, does last; For as your tears, and sorrow-wounded soul, Prove well that on your part this bond is whole, So all we know of what they do above, Is that they happy are, and that they love. Let dark oblivion, and the hollow grave, Content themselves our frailer thoughts to have; Well-chosen love is never taught to die, But with our nobler part invades the sky. Then grieve no more that one so heavenly shaped The crooked hand of trembling age escaped; Rather, since we beheld her not decay, But that she vanish'd so entire away, Her wondrous beauty, and her goodness, merit We should suppose that some propitious spirit In that celestial form frequented here, And is not dead, but ceases to appear.

Edmund Waller

...he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.

John Updike

A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world.

Maurice Chevalier

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